Obama, Clinton criticize Trump for proposed Muslim ban

WASHINGTON: Democratic President Barack Obama lambasted Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants on Tuesday in an angry denunciation of the Republican presidential candidate’s response to the Orlando nightclub massacre.

Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democrat he has endorsed to succeed him in the Nov. 8 general election, made nearly simultaneous speeches responding to Trump, the New York mogul who is soon to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

Clearly annoyed, Obama used a speech at the Treasury Department to respond to Trump’s proposed suspension of immigration from countries with a “history of terrorism” in response to the killing of 49 people early on Sunday in Orlando, Florida. The gunman was U.S.-born Omar Mateen, 29, whose parents immigrated from Afghanistan.

The president, without mentioning Trump by name, dismissed the Republican’s criticism of Obama for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe Islamic State militants. Obama called the phrase a political distraction.

“What exactly would using this label accomplish, what exactly would it change?” Obama said. “Someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting? … There’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ It’s a political talking point.”

Obama, who canceled a joint appearance with Clinton planned on Wednesday in Wisconsin due to the events in Orlando, appeared to be enjoying his role in the campaign to select his successor. He tangled with Trump in 2011, producing his birth certificate to refute Trump’s claim that the president was not born in the United States.

“We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States to bar all Muslims from immigrating to America. We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence,” Obama said. “Where does this stop?”

Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, addressed supporters in Pittsburgh. The candidate said Trump’s proposal bolstered her case that he was temperamentally unfit to serve as president, saying the commander in chief “is a job that demands a calm, collected and dignified response” to events like the Orlando massacre.

Clinton noted that Trump seemed to suggest on Monday in a television interview that Obama might have somehow been responsible for the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a point that Trump said he did not make.

“I have to ask: Will responsible Republican leaders stand up to their presumptive nominee or will they stand by his accusation about our president?” she said.

The biting criticism was likely to increase the discomfort among many establishment Republican leaders about Trump with little more than a month until party figures gather in Cleveland July 18-21 to formally nominate him.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, the top U.S. elected Republican who was his party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, on Tuesday distanced himself from the proposed Muslim ban in a further sign of establishment unease with Trump’s agenda.

Ryan endorsed Trump two weeks ago but subsequently chided him for calling a federal judge biased because of the U.S.-born jurist’s Mexican heritage.

“I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interests,” said Ryan, who last year criticized Trump’s original proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Ryan and like-minded establishment Republicans have struggled to reconcile their desire to unify the party before a tough fight against Clinton while at the same time separating themselves from some of the positions and rhetoric of Trump, who defeated 16 rivals to win the presidential nomination battle.

U.S. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who sources say is among the Republicans that Trump is considering for his vice presidential nominee, said he was “discouraged” by the way the Trump campaign was going.

“It wasn’t the type of speech one would expect,” Corker said of Trump’s Monday speech in New Hampshire.

Trump was to hold a campaign rally on Tuesday night in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Trump has been resolute in demanding tighter immigration policies, and the Orlando attack has prompted him to intensify his rhetoric as he tries to win more support from Americans with deep security fears.

Trump noted that Mateen’s parents were born in Afghanistan. Pointing to specific incidents such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he said threats were posed by people with roots in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

Trump on Tuesday met at Trump Tower in New York with a host of Republican governors, including Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin, who a source close to the campaign says is also on Trump’s short list to be his vice presidential running mate.

A Republican official said others in the meeting included the governors of Mississippi, Arizona, Arkansas, Nebraska and Tennessee, as well as New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a close Trump adviser and former presidential rival.